Middle Class is Mike Atta, Jeff Atta, Matt Simon and Mike Patton (no, not that Mike Patton). Depending on who you ask, you might be told they are the first ever hardcore band, or you might get kicked in the gut with a pre-scuffed Urban Outfitters combat boot. After a very long spell, the band reunited last year to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Frontier Records—the label that put out Middle Class’ 1979 EP, “Out of Vogue.” Now they’re returning to the Echoplex to play a badass L.A. RECORD show with Kid Congo, the Urinals and Grant Hart. This interview by Jonny Bell.

Do you get confused with the other Mike Patton?
Mike Patton (bass): Yeah, when I was living in Santa Monica one time I got a phone call and it was a girl and she asked, ‘Is this Mike Patton?’ I go, ‘Yeah,’ and she just screamed. ‘Aahhhhhh!!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you must be thinking of that other guy …’
Mike Atta (guitar): Nobody’s ever screamed for me. People have screamed at me …
Do you ever get super fans coming into your vintage shop Out Of Vogue?
MA: I wouldn’t say super fans—they don’t scream or anything—but I get kids in here who will be standing over here by the records or by the guitars and they’ll be nudging each other and whispering, ‘That’s him.’ And I’m just like the slob behind the counter, and finally I’ll ask ’em, ‘Can I help you?’ And they’ll say, ‘Are you the guy?’ and I’ll say, ‘Well, that depends. What guy?’ ‘The Middle Class?’ ‘Yeah I’m the guy.’
So tell me about The Sound of Music club in San Francisco …
MA: The club I remember best of all was the Deaf Club.
Matt Simon (drums): I remember very distinctly playing there, like an afternoon show with the Toiling Midgets where we were going to leave right after and come home. And I started coming on to the acid and I remember seeing all these people—rolling drunks and stuff—this is my Sound of Music story—and I see this old black guy who comes walking up and I was like, ‘Hey, you should be careful. You’re all drunk and I just saw these people rob this guy.’ So I sat and talked to him for like five or ten minutes. Then he said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and he opened his jacket and he had a badge and gun and everything, and I thought, Oh, Jesus Christ. I was just coming on to the acid.
MP: The Deaf Club was really cool, it was a club for deaf people and we played a show and the deaf people that were around were behind the amplifiers and a bunch of them were touching the bass amp and putting their heads against the walls to get into the vibrations. We played with the Bags and Patricia [Morrison] lost her bass after the show and I remember going into a room looking for it and asking if anyone had seen a bass. When no one turned around I yelled, ‘Hey! What are you all deaf?’
MA: I remember it being next door to a hotel where punk rockers lived and it was like one of those places where you walk in past the guy in the glass case and he hands you a towel. One of those kinds of places with heroin addicts and everything.
You guys were pretty interested in the San Francisco scene?
MA: I think we were more accepted up there by the scene and the kids and everything than we were in Los Angeles. I think at that time, when were playing with the Wounds and the Toiling Midgets—what would that have been 1980, 81?—I don’t think their scene was like the scene down here. The scene down here had become more hardcore with like the beach scene and everything, and they may have had hardcore elements up there but it wasn’t the same kind of thing. It seemed like they were open to more kinds of music.
Why do you think that the bands in San Francisco didn’t end up being quite so ‘legendary’ as a lot of the Southern California bands?
MA: Well, the Avengers and the Nuns and all those bands—they were all pretty big San Francisco bands and they could do pretty well in L.A., but I don’t think they did well with the crowd that was the crowd that liked TSOL and the Adolescents and all that kind of stuff.
MS: I think the L.A. punk scene was bigger too—there was more music industry stuff down here, more records put out.
MP: What was the Sound of Music’s or whatever’s fanzine? Oh, Search & Destroy. It was too intellectual —it was intellectual and party and L.A. was not.
MA: I would say San Francisco was more like the earlier parts of the L.A. scene, where you had a lot of people that were art school, you know like the Weirdos and X and all those bands that went to CalArts or whatever—poetry readings and all that.
What were some of your favorite bands growing up?
Jeff Atta (vocals): Leading up to the band, like before ’74-’75, me and Mike would go to Licorice Pizza in Santa Ana and they’d have all these weird imports and stuff like that, and we got into Eno and Roxy Music and stuff like that.
MP: When I was growing up, I didn’t listen to music. And when I met Jeff in high school he introduced me to Mott the Hoople and New York Dolls, and I kind of got introduced to rock ‘n’ roll when Jeff and I were hanging around. I remember Jeff had the English music magazines, and Creem magazine we used to read. Creem had this little article about this new thing in England called ‘punk rock,’ and they listed the Sex Pistols, the Damned and the Buzzcocks—those three bands. And in high school people would ask you what bands you liked and I would say the Damned, and I didn’t even know what they sounded like.
MA: I think for me, at that time—I was about 14 when you guys were discovering all that other stuff—I was listening to stuff like Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, anything that would go along with my pot-smoking at the time. And then I remember when I was 15 and a half, almost 16, I started playing guitar and everybody else that was playing guitar was trying to learn Aerosmith and stuff like that, and you guys had gotten like the Dictators and the Ramones in like ’76, and you said, ‘You should try playing this.’
MS: You guys covered a lot of Ramones songs when you first started right?
MA: Yeah, when we first started and it was me and Mike and a couple other people. We were doing Stones songs, Ramones songs …
MP: ‘Cause it was easy.
You started off playing a lot of cover songs?
MA: Yeah, just in our studio. We had a storage unit that was converted into a place for us to rehearse and that’s where we started playing that, and then writing some of our own stuff. But we were into writing songs like Wire and the Ramones. We just didn’t know how fast it was going to end up.
I know it’s a simple question, but why did you start playing so fast?
MA: It wasn’t premeditated—that’s for sure.
JA: I think we thought, ‘OK, punk is loud and it’s fast,’ so we just played as loud and fast as we could. We weren’t intentionally trying to play any faster than anyone else …
MP: And it wasn’t something we really noticed until people started saying, ‘Wow, you guys are really fast!’
MA: We didn’t know anything about the ‘rules’ of music. You know, all those bands like X and everybody, they were all based in blues—they all still had that ‘thing.’ We didn’t know anything about that. We didn’t know about relative minors. I’ve had people say, ‘You know that song “Introductory Rights”? Did you know that song is only one chord?’ [Laughs] Rob Ritter from 45 Grave, Gun Club and all that—he always recorded bands early on. He had a cassette recorder with him all the time, and he goes, ‘I was trying to figure out how to play your songs. What kind of alternative tuning do you use?’ And I go, ‘Alternative? I just tune to Mike.’ … On the speed thing, we recorded on the record that Frontier put out there a version of a song ‘You Belong’ that’s a half a minute longer than the 45 version—and it was just a six-month period till we got to the speed of the ‘Out of Vogue’ single. And like I said, it wasn’t intentional. I don’t know how we got there; it was just a lot of Dr. Pepper and Suzy Q’s. … I remember consciously drinking Dr. Pepper and being kind of like straight-edge after reading in Trouser Press magazine where they were first talking about ‘the punks’ and that they’re against all rock ‘n’ roll conventions, all what’s supposed to be rock ‘n’ roll—the drugs and all that. So we took that to mean that we weren’t supposed to get high, we were just supposed to play this music. It didn’t take long to find out that wasn’t true.
MP: Well, that was one of the reasons I think the L.A. people liked us—we were cute. We were from Orange County, we were straight, we were VERY straight.
MA: I smoked pot before Middle Class, and I quit once we started because I thought you weren’t supposed to do dope or anything like that. It wasn’t until later that I really started smoking a lot of pot. [Laughs]
JA: At that time we were living in Santa Ana, and later in Fullerton. That’s why we got so big up in L.A., because as far as we knew we were the only people in Orange County playing punk rock. Later we found out there were people in Fullerton, Huntington Beach, recording around the same time, but were totally isolated.
MA: At that time there really wasn’t a lot of bands coming out of Orange County at all. When we got interviewed for the Masque when Brendan Mullen was writing his book, he asked, ‘Was it hard? People always said that people in the L.A. scene wouldn’t allow bands from the South Bay and Orange County to come up and play?’ Well for us, it’s because that didn’t exist yet. Everybody that was in those early bands—those first waver bands—they were all from someplace else anyways. How many people were really from Hollywood? They were all glitter kids from the Valley or the Dils and the Zeros were from Carlsbad or San Diego. … Our first show, I just met the guys from the Zeros and asked if we could play; told ’em we had a band and they said, ‘Yeah, you can play next week.’ It was that simple. It was with the Bags, the Controllers and Skulls or something like that. Kind of a different time—that’s for sure.
Do you think there’ll ever be a scene as vibrant as the scene back then?
MA: I talk to a lot of the kids coming in here today. I talk to Audacity, and I ask them how they keep up and everybody’s in a band now—it’s easy for everyone to get their content out there. Before it was like you had no choice—if you wanted to be part of punk rock you had to be part of a little scene. I mean there are little scenes still. Burger Records has their little thing—
MS: —but it’s not underground. You can’t keep anything underground anymore; it’s very difficult in the computer age.
MA: It gets co-opted or whatever, and I don’t know, it’s just like fashion today—it’s just all taking parts of other things. … We never dressed like punk rockers; we dressed pretty much like what you see now, but in high school everybody had long hair and it was still an outcast kind of thing. … Now, you can go to any high school in the United States and you can’t tell what people are into because everybody looks hip or indie or whatever. Before, you could identify a person and be like, ‘That guy’s a loadie, that guys a surfer, that guy’s a punk rocker.’ Now it’s like the guys that are in bands like Mumford & Sons or whatever, look the same as the guys in Audacity! They’re all wearing flannel cowboy shirts, and these guys are playing songs about squirrels?
MS: When I got into punk, I just cut my hair and started wearing ties, and older people would say, ‘You’re a very nice young man. You’re thinking of joining the military?’ And people my age were like, ‘You’re just an idiot.’
MA: I just saw this posting from a friend of my wife’s son’s band and it’s called ‘post-hardcore,’ but they all have haircuts like Disney channel kids. But I guess that it’s ‘post-hardcore metal’, not ‘post-hardcore punk’ or something. I don’t know! … You know it’s interesting because in the original punk rock scene from L.A.—and I think S.F was the same—when you look at bands that were involved like Weirdos, Screamers, Middle Class … when you listen to these bands individually, they kind of sound like they shouldn’t be playing together. You got the Middle Class playing with the Screamers and when you listen to the Screamers now you hear them doing like bloop-beep—all that kind of stuff. I think they all fit together because it was all outcast things. Later on, when you had your hardcore punk scene, you could put four hardcore bands together and it was kind of a blur of music.
MP: And the problem with the hardcore scene was that it became very regimented, and there was a certain way you were supposed to look and a certain way you were supposed to be and it was completely the opposite of what punk started as.
MS: It was not a friendly scene! If you weren’t connected or dressed right you were in danger of getting hurt bad.
MA: I just remember when you played shows up to 1980 or so, you could look out into the crowd and there would be a bunch of girls in the audience. By 1981 you looked down there and everyone had a shaved head and no shirt on! I saw this amazing picture on this Mabuhay thing: Black Flag playing at Mabuhay Gardens and it was Henry Rollins and he was just like all tense and flexed and tight and everything, and there’s like four guys in the front and they all looked exactly the same.
It became like a church …
MA: Yeah exactly. I read this thing about our band and our relationship with hardcore and they wrote that if we would have just done our first single and kept with that music, that we would’ve been as popular as Black Flag. But we changed the formula.
MP: I remember when we played the Fleetwood, some guy came in with long hair while we were playing and got pummeled by the crowd because he wasn’t supposed to be there, and there was a real visceral reaction. I remember Jeff refused to play the first singles. We wouldn’t play them and we broke from that.
MA: I just remember you would start playing and everybody’s back was turned and they’d be all ready to start throwing down and stuff.
MS: I think the ratio of being hit to throwing punches must’ve been 50 to 1. We’ve been beaten up a lot more than we’ve beaten. [Laughs] It’s not a TSOL kind of thing where there are these four big guys who were like ass-kickers.
MP: The original punks were not jocks, you know—they were all losers. But then the jocks got into it and saw about an inch deep of what punk rock was. Didn’t get the whole concept of it. Put on the uniform, and there were jocks and assholes coming in, and now that was hardcore.
MA: We’re going to get beat up again, aren’t we?
Do you think ‘Out of Vogue’ was the first hardcore single?
MA: Some people that were in the original scene, Alice Bag or something, they’ll say it was proto-punk or the beginning of thrash punk or whatever, and I’ll take it, because it’s what gets us known and stuff. And people say this led to that, or Black Flag was a heavy metal band till they heard the ‘Out of Vogue’ single. People will argue that thing with the Bad Brains: ‘Look at the two records—Middle Class was ’78, Bad Brains was ’79.’ You know, I think that the arguments are pretty funny. A blog I was just reading yesterday was saying Black Flag was the first hardcore band. ‘Their single came out in ’76.’ I’m like, ‘What? Where did you get that from?’
JA: All that stuff is just a record collector thing. You have to pick something, somebody always had to be the first one. It’s just like the argument about who was the first ‘punk’ band, and somebody will say, ‘Oh, Iggy was.’
MA: No—Sonics!
MS: It was Charlie Parker!
MA: Next thing you know people are saying it was the Carter Family or something. I think [‘Out of Vogue’] was influential to a lot of people, and I’ll take that.
What do you think about all the old punk bands re-uniting?
MA: I find the whole thing kind of interesting that bands like ours, or bands like TSOL or whatever the bands are can actually play these shows, and they’ll be a mixture of young people and old people. I just remember being 19-20 years old and having absolutely no desire to see bands that had existed 30 years prior, you know what I mean?
MS: Yeah—like going to see the Coasters!
MA: I remember one time when we were about 23-24, and we went to go see Eric Burdon. We were fed up with punk rock so we were looking back at some of the old stuff like the Animals, doing something different. So we went to Eric Burdon at the Roxy and he looked all Vegas! Had his shirt open and all these gold chains on. And he did a medley of the Animals’ hits and we were all like, ‘Uhhhh …’
MS: I remember that and we were—I hate to say this—a little bit famous at the time and the guy was like, ‘Here, we’ve got seats for you right up front.’ After like the third song we were like, ‘Let’s get outta here!’ It was terrible. It was unbearable!
MA: I think it’s interesting that kids and people find inspiration in going to see these old bands and everything. I mean, I’m completely thrilled by it. I’m flattered that a 15-year-old kid would come in here and actually value my opinion on music and stuff, cuz I could tell you that when I was their age I could give a fuck about what somebody that was 30 or 40 years old thought about music. People will bring CDs in for me and ask, ‘Can you listen to this?’ and I’ll say, ‘You know, there’s nothing I can really do for you.’ [Laughs] It’s kind of cool that they care. With the Audacity kids I was like, ‘You guys wanna play behind my store?’ Haha!
MP: The fact that anybody cares is fucking awesome.
Watching you guys play was great, as opposed to maybe the Germs or something. You heard about what they’re doing now?
MA: Yeah, of course. We were going to try and get a guy from ER to take Jeff’s place if he wasn’t going to do the show. .. An actor! But anyways … they tried to get us to do the Germs return show a couple years ago. They said, ‘We got the Minutemen, we got the Germs.’ And I was like, ‘D. Boon’s dead, Darby’s dead. How are you guys doing that?’ Didn’t make any sense to me. … Maybe the actor is good, but to me it’s like going to see Wild Child as the Doors or Atomic Punks doing Van Halen. But, believe me, more people go to see that than the Middle Class!
MS: You know, like I watched the Adolescents and TSOL and they’ve obviously practiced all the way through and they’re tight and perfect, but to me that’s not really the most important thing. They’ve been playing the same set over and over again like for 20 years, but for us it’s a lot different, you know, cuz we’ve just started playing this stuff again this year.
MA: It’s kind of like Middle Class was before … The way we play and the way it is, all it takes is just one little thing to go wrong to throw it into a complete mess. You never know when the wheels are going to fly off and that’s what makes it kind of exciting. And you know with some of these other bands you can tell that it can be done in their sleep.
What’d you guys do in the thirty or so years since the band broke up?
MA: I was in a band with Alice from the Bags called Cambridge Apostles; I did that for a little bit. For a very short time I had a band with Ward Dotson from Gun Club, and for a while I didn’t do anything except for play with Matt’s band—he was in a band called the Pontiac Brothers. They discovered the Doll Hut here in Anaheim and started that thing.
MP: I played in Trotsky Icepick with Jack Grisham [of TSOL], then I was going to college and was in a couple bands—Breathe and Young Caucasians.
MA: Wait, you were in Breathe?
MP: Yeah, when I was going to Fullerton college. A different Breathe.
MA: Oh, there was a band Breath—
MS: —Bad Breath! They were the first hardcore uhhh …
MA: —Gingivitis band! Then you took over the Eddie empire—Eddie and the Subtitles.
MP: Yeah, when Eddie bailed, I presided over the crumbling empire—produced China White, Adolescents, Christian Death …
MA: Oh, I thought that was the other Mike Patton!

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS THE MIDDLE CLASS WITH KID CONGO AND THE PINK MONKEY BIRDS, GRANT HART AND THE URINALS ON FRI., JUNE 24, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $16-$18 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE! VISIT THE MIDDLE CLASS AT FACEBOOK.COM/THEMIDDLECLASSOFFICIAL.

Stream: Luis and the Wildfires “Wild In The Head”

(from Brain Jail available now from Wild and Norton)

Luis & the Wildfires make records between egg crates and a tacked-up Charlie Feathers LP in a tiny backyard shed in Altadena where the spirit of the Sonics, Eddie Cochran, Little Willie G and Gene Vincent observe kindly from the corners. Wild Records started with Reb Kennedy plus Luis and drummer Angel Hernandez ten years ago as the Wild Teens in the Valley and now puts out the most materially honest CDs of the 21st century and 45s that will cost $100 in ten years. The hardiest die-hards of Wild meet after another backyard session for High Life and cookies doled out by Wild owner Reb’s wife and son. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

What did you mean when you said you’ve been mouthbreathing for 31 years?
Luis Arriaga (vocals/guitar): They make fun of me because I have a deviated septum and sleep apnea and I smoke and I drink and I sing—
Reb Kennedy (Wild founder/owner): And he nosebreathes.
And he’s a nightmare on tour?
Angel Hernandez (drums): Yes, he is! The worst!
Luis Arriaga: I still seem to survive it. I should be dead! I’m living on borrowed time!
Reb Kennedy: I always tell him to keep his phone when he’s on stage, and if he has a heart attack to call me, and my first call can be to the record manufacturers. ‘Make another thousand, quick!’
Luis Arriaga: The devil’s been knocking on my door, and Reb’s like, ‘Don’t worry—we got a contract, and you can have him after.’
Reb Kennedy: We did a show in Vegas last year and our stage was outside on a rooftop, and Luis jumped up on this balcony with a bar—he had his arms out doing the crucifix pose and the whole audience just went quiet. The drop was a couple hundred feet.
Luis Arriaga: Fifty-five stories up!
Reb Kennedy: ‘Fall! Fall! Fall!’
Luis Arriaga: With the manufacturers on speed dial. ‘Fall! Fall! I need another thousand copies of Brain Jail!’
Why don’t you fake your death?
Luis Arriaga: I die every day I wake up. I’m only alive when I’m sleeping.
How do you wake up in the morning?
Luis Arriaga: I’m angry at the world for the fact my eyes are open again!
What do you dream about?
Luis Arriaga: That I’m skiing! But only because I had four guys in my bed. ‘Swinging my skis and the snow was melting …’ And all the guys in the bed woke up—‘This is the best bed ever! The best rest I ever had!’ Don’t print that—my mom’s gonna read this!
What are your nightmares about?
Luis Arriaga: They’re never really nightmares. My nightmare is waking up.
Does this have anything to do with the line in ‘I’m a Man’ about living in a badger cave?
Luis Arriaga: ‘Panther cave.’ Do they really live in caves? It makes no sense. Proof of my life.
I know you got into rock ‘n’ roll when you were 16, so what were you into when you were 15?
Luis Arriaga: Before I saw the light? There are two answers—you want the real one or the other one? The honest one—I know it sounds extremely goddamn cliché, but I grew up in the San Fernando Valley. North Hollywood. There’s a theater there—El Portal. My dad took me there to see La Bamba. I was like 7 years old whenever that movie came out—I saw the movie and had no concept of what rock ‘n’ roll music was and I absolutely goddamned loved it. I told my dad I wanted a guitar, and my dad went to buy drugs in Tijuana—prescription drugs because they’re legal—and he brought me back a guitar. I attempted to learn it, but I put it down because everyone was evolving into different things, but I’d still come home and attempt to strum ‘La Bamba.’ Oldies things, as I knew them. Growing up I got into everything—grunge, hip-hop, everything. Not until 16 did I pick it up again and I’d watch other people play on TV. I learned one chord and then a second chord—
Reb Kennedy: And then he stopped!
Luis Arriaga: Only two chords since 16! I went back once I learned those two chords—went back to remembering those songs, and once I learned those songs, I was the only guy around what I remember in the Valley … the change came from one day to the next! I don’t know what was in my mind. I attempted to comb my hair into a pompadour! From there, I learned more music and met people—and I met him. We were really young. He’s my brother.
Reb Kennedy: Angel is the only constant in Luis’ bands.
Luis Arriaga: See those wrinkles? See that gray hair? He’s still 17!
What’s the most delinquency you’ve committed within view of a police car?
Luis Arriaga: My parole officer might see this! When we started the Wild Teens, a lot of us were teenagers. Growing up the way we grew up, we did stupid things!
Reb Kennedy: The most obvious—walk out of a club, fall down, stand up, get in the car and drive away!
In what ways would you be a good role model?
Luis Arriaga: You’re asking the most ridiculous questions!
Reb Kennedy: Luis and Angel won’t answer that! It’d be immodest! One thing that’s interesting—I’m Irish, and obviously people find it very bizarre that all my friends are Mexican on my label. We’re called ‘Mexican Rock ‘n’ Roll’ but I’m not!
Luis Arriaga: People in Europe think he’s Mexican.
Reb Kennedy: It’s the blue eyes!
So you’ve seen The Commitments?
Reb Kennedy: I know the guys very well! What you see in The Commitments is what you see any Saturday night at any Mexican party. It’s a very dignified thing, the love of music. I grew up from the age of whatever—being in bars with my family, being in bars singing!
Luis Arriaga: It’s that Catholic background.
What happens when you combine Catholicism with rock ‘n’ roll?
Luis Arriaga: X-ray vision!
Reb Kennedy: Hatred! But I do wanna answer that question. One of the most important things we’ve achieved as a label is that young Mexican individuals in California don’t have much to look to musically. They have Ritchie Valens—
Thee Midniters?
Luis Arriaga: But they don’t look beyond certain things.
Reb Kennedy: There’s only a handful of things to look to. Luis and the Wild Teens and Luis & the Wildfires have given a new wave of teenagers something to look to! I tell Luis and Angel and the rest of the guys—it’s a really weird position. It’s very easy now to underappreciate what you’ve achieved because it’s now! But it will be looked back on as something significant. They are NOW role models for people—for Mexican kids who have nothing to look to.
Luis Arriaga: The young guys on the label started covering songs him and I did ten years ago. I heard and I went home and cried. And masturbated.
Angel Hernandez: Into a taco.
That’s a Saturday night.
Luis Arriaga: A fantastic Saturday night! Watching ‘Sábado Gigante’! Put in the fact I said ‘Sabado Gee-HAN-tay.’ Mexican!
How did the Wild Teens set the direction for Wild? They were the first band.
Luis Arriaga: We sucked! We truly did suck!
Reb Kennedy: They did! We just remastered the Wild Teens record a week ago—we really wanted something in existence to show the band was a good rock ‘n’ roll band. And back then the band couldn’t play.
Angel Hernandez: Sure could drink, though!
Reb Kennedy: Here’s a picture of the Wild Teens. They used to play my club almost all the time. The people who owned it were really cool people—gave them unlimited alcohol! Top shelf! They complained once because we drank $1,000 worth of alcohol. The owner came to me one night and said, ‘I have a problem. You know we give everyone as much alcohol as they want—but I don’t understand when the Wild Teens play why the bar is littered with bottles that they brought in!’ Free alcohol and they still smuggle it in—I think it gave them a hard-on!
Luis Arriaga: It was either that or guns! Guns, gangs, bandannas, whiskey—
Don’t give away the recipe!
Luis Arriaga: We were just silly boys. Silly boys. That first 45 was in 1999—ten years ago! There should be something in the liners about it being ten years. We revisited old songs that I never wanted to sing ever again. But Reb had the brilliant idea—
Reb Kennedy: I wanted to record something with guys who could now play! That band could not play!
Luis Arriaga: But we looked cool as fuck!
Sam Phillips said if you want a rock ‘n’ roll song, you gotta reach down and pull it out your asshole. Is that how you guys do it?
Reb Kennedy: It is! All ours guys have really big assholes. There’s a lot of stuff stored there!
What are the Wild Christmas parties like?
Angel Hernandez: The last ten years are pretty hazy.
Reb Kennedy: The public parties? They vary in so many ways. We had different places. We were every Friday at my house before my son was born—annihilation sessions. Friday and Saturday and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—
Luis Arriaga: Reb was a massive drinker.
Reb Kennedy: I drank for the Olympics. Some of the younger guys don’t see me drink. When my son was born I stopped. Partly because of my son and partly because I wouldn’t be successful if I kept drinking. When we do a Wild showcase in Green Bay or Vegas—right now we have sixteen bands on the label. An Australian band, two English, one Portuguese—I have to get every one of these fuckers on stage and off stage! I used to try and do that drunk and it was a problem! We did a show in Green Bay and had a review in the Metro Times that said we were the new Jesus Christs of music—they said amazing things about us! That day the show lasted what—fourteen hours?
Angel Hernandez: Plus the drinking session!
Reb Kennedy: Absolutely incredible show.
Is this like when everyone on Motown would come spilling out of the same tour bus?
Reb Kennedy: That’s the way it works.
Luis Arriaga: We pride ourselves on being the ‘Wild Records Family.’
Reb Kennedy: That’s corny as shit! Put a ‘TM’ and ‘R’! It’s the most ridiculous corny bullshit but we do function that way. If you were here two hours before, there’d have been another fifteen or twenty people.
Luis Arriaga: All doing handclaps on the record!
Reb Kennedy: It’s how we survive! We are a traditional label. Labels don’t exist like us where my job is to do everything. I try to do it fairly.
Luis Arriaga: It’s underrated sometimes. The guy who sits in back? Nothing would be possible for any of us if it wasn’t for him. He’s not just my boss—as sort of the manager and label owner—he’s one of my best friends. His work is never ever done. Ours is—we come here and we’re done when we leave the studio. He goes back in the house and thinks about what the hell just happened!
Reb Kennedy: And fix it!
Luis Arriaga: Clean up the studio and wake up the next day after five or six hours and make sure his son is at school and his wife is fine and then think, ‘What the hell is gonna happen again?’
Angel Hernandez: He has 47 children, basically!
Luis Arriaga: I want it to be known—it’s ridiculous!
That’s how they ran labels in the ’50s and ’60s—all those tiny family labels putting out soul in Detroit.
Luis Arriaga: We’re a DIY label—if that makes us ’77 punk, good!
Reb Kennedy: We’re not 1956! We’re 1976! That’s where I come from. I worked at Rough Trade in London.
Luis Arriaga: We’re gonna do a Joy Division cover—‘Digital.’
Reb Kennedy: I thought it should be ‘Isolation’!
Luis Arriaga: That would ruin me! But you know what’s cool? I’m already ruined! I can only go up from here! It cannot get worse!
What’s the most you were ever ruined in one night?
Reb Kennedy: He doesn’t remember!
Luis Arriaga: Punched in the head by Omar [Romero] in his own house!
Reb Kennedy: Last week was good—all these naked photos of Luis circulating among us! He was so mad!
Luis Arriaga: The hell with you, Reb! My mom is gonna read this! Don’t print it in Spanish. This isn’t a bilingual paper, is it?
What’s the most you ever had to fight through to finish a song?
Angel Hernandez: Do you mean fighting each other?
Reb Kennedy: What’s amazing is the condition he can be in and still get on stage and take your breath away. I’ve seen him in the most fucked-up state of any human being—he’ll get out and do the business. He’ll hurt before, he’ll hurt doing it, he’ll hurt for days after—he physically will hurt! He has asthma!
Luis Arriaga: I should be dead! Reb will tell the devil when to take me!
Reb Kennedy: I’m keeping him going for a little bit.
How do you cure your hangovers?
Luis Arriaga: I drink every day! I’ve never not had a hangover. My mom is gonna read this! Can I say, ‘Happy birthday, Mom? I love you!’ My parents have never seen me perform but they support that I do. He’s my brother—we were teenagers together—16, 17, from the San Fernando Valley. We’d stay at my mom’s house. We’d come home at 3 or 4 in the morning drunk as fuck—underage! We took the bus home!—and my dad would wake us up at 7 AM to pick oranges or mow the lawn.
With an evil smile?
Luis Arriaga: My family is the most amazing family. They tried to teach us a lesson and also laughed at us. A Mexican traditional family—they know we were gonna get drunk.
Angel Hernandez: After his dad would make us do chores, his mom would be like, ‘I don’t cook on weekends … but you earned it.’
Luis Arriaga: It’s a weird thing—music in my family. I never heard music growing up. At all. It was a very odd thing to play at home. If you were playing music, something was going on in your life, so you’d try not to play it. It was very hidden. If I played music, I was sad or happy and my mom would ask, ‘Why are you sad? Why are you happy?’ So there was no music in our household. I think that’s the opposite of most people in music? So I hid all my music. Or not hid, but I’d listen to it on my own. Headphones, old cassettes, Walkmans and shit. A lot of Brenton Wood. ‘Gimme Little Sign.’
Which you translated for Los Straitjackets?
Luis Arriaga: Yeah, and that’s how I met Cesar Rosas.
Did you tell him about La Bamba?
Luis Arriaga: I didn’t! I should have! What I did do—they put me on the spot and it was so awkward. They gave me the address and one day’s notice—‘Can you come tomorrow?’ I also translated Barbara Lynn—‘You’ll Lose a Good Thing.’ Freddy Fender did it too but I did my own—which I thought was amazing! Which I think I still have? Which Gizzelle should do. So they took me down to the house and asked me to do a few translations and who opens the door but Cesar with the goatee and sunglasses? I’m like, ‘Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod!’ He has a whole section where it was the studio and lounge area. All the Straitjackets were there and some of the guys from Los Lobos and all over the walls were gold and platinum albums, and then a section where it’s all the guitars from all the albums they ever did! Like he never used them again type of deal! It’s a fucking shrine! I don’t think he did it—his wife did it, maybe? And he had a big long TV set with Grammys all over it, and there was a Grammy on the floor! So for the first time in my life and maybe only I picked up a Grammy and dusted it off—
Angel Hernandez: And put it in your pocket?
Luis Arriaga: And it’s right here on my keychain! The first and only time I ever held a Grammy.
So far.
Luis Arriaga: I’m too old! If I haven’t made it yet, I’m not gonna make it now! My looks are fading as we speak!
Reb Kennedy: There must be some quirk or perversion—women who like guys who look like hound dogs.
Luis Arriaga: People who like licking awkward things?
What’s the one thing you’ll never get tired of writing about?
Luis Arriaga: Everything I do is absolutely based on love. ‘Let’s Party’ was written while I was in love. It’s not necessarily about a corny love story, it’s about drinking and having a goddamn good time! Because I was in love and in a good place. ‘Wild in the Head,’ which is also on Brain Jail, is also love as well. Every song I ever write based on how I felt is because of love. It’s the leading force in anything I do. I’m very emotional—probably more than I wanna admit! More than I should admit. At some points embarrassing to admit. But everything I do is based off of love. I think some of my best friends know. Whenever a song is written—it can be the most minimal lyrics, but there’s a line in there that explains myself. I try to write a hook or a party song but I always try to incorporate me. If I’m happy because I felt that that day or was in that state of life, and if it’s a bad song … ‘Mouth Hug’ is not about blow jobs at all!
Reb Kennedy: You don’t give them! Or do you?
Luis Arriaga: People think that song is about hugging somebody. Really? I’m gonna write a song about a hug! I was receiving a mouth hug? I listened to everything there is about music. When I was a lot younger—when I met Reb I was probably 20 or 21, eleven years ago or twelve—I thought I knew what was happening with music, but I always wanted to experiment. Being around him made me wanna look for other music. He knows absolutely everything there is to know! Because he’s 75 years old! He was in World War I! He’s seen it all!
Reb Kennedy: Square wheels on cars!
Luis Arriaga: The first television set! Amazing! Not that he necessarily taught me, but knowing someone I was around was listening to something else made me wanna listen to something else. Made me say, ‘Why are they doing this? Who influenced them?’ Like Devendra—one of my biggest things at the moment. I don’t wanna follow anybody! I don’t follow anybody! I love every aspect of music—from rockabilly to soul to blues to garage to punk to indie to folk to freak folk. I don’t wanna be somebody else exactly. There are things I wanna do. Since I’m into the Devendra thing, I’d love to do something like that, but I’d never follow him. I do what I do and hope it’s a different direction. I don’t wanna stay dormant in one sound. I think I will die if I did the exact same sound for ten years—I will die! Sometimes I’m nervous to move on but …
Reb Kennedy: What’s really important with Luis and all our acts—everyone as individuals, Angel and Luis, they all like music. They all like music and they all listen to music. But I don’t see a heavy influence by anything out there. We all go to shows all the time. We’re not people who you don’t see out—we pay our money and watch whatever! We did the Rolling Stones song for Norton and did Van Morrison for Norton, but that’s not saying those are necessarily influences. Our guys are influenced by what we are doing as a unit more than the past or present. We’re lucky. Luis writes a lot of material. A lot of acts write a lot. Omar—it’s almost like competition. Not as winner or loser, but the guys try and write very clever things! Luis explaining how he writes songs is a very cool thing. Anybody can write, ‘I fell in love today, my heart was broke tomorrow …’
Angel Hernandez: Can we use that?
Luis Arriaga: It’s a hit!
Reb Kennedy: That’s what they wrote for the last 50 years! You have to listen and find where the emotion is! Even in rockabilly—Omar writes about the heartache he goes through, but he doesn’t write, ‘I fell in love today, fell out of love tomorrow …’
Luis Arriaga: Totally a hit!
Reb Kennedy: The guys are clever—it’s not writing by formula writing.
How does Luis & the Wildfires fit into L.A.? You seem so self-contained.
Reb Kennedy: L.A. has no influence! We could be anywhere in the world.
Luis Arriaga: Michigan! No Mexicans in Michigan. There isn’t—we were there! Rarely any Mexicans.
Angel Hernandez: Even the taco stand didn’t have Mexicans.
Reb Kennedy: People talk about indie music—we ARE independent music. Anyone else is full of shit! We are independent! This is our studio. We are self-sufficient! It’s all material by our own people. We record, mix and master our own material. We manufacture our own sleeves. Nobody influences how we sell or who we sell to. We’re truly independent. So it doesn’t matter where we are. We’re in this garage—we can take that anywhere!
Link Wray actually did that.
Reb Kennedy: It makes no difference we’re in L.A. We are the new wave and a lot of old acts are threatened by the new wave.
Luis Arriaga: We surpassed the people we saw—I know it’s a bold goddamn statement to say but we have surpassed… don’t print that! I don’t wanna get jumped later! They look to us but never wanna admit—the old generation don’t ever wanna let another generation in.
Reb Kennedy: The old guard may read that and say ,‘Fuck off! You can’t play as good as me!’ They missed the point! Luis isn’t saying that structured guitar playing is better—we have true energy, true soul… We’re not jaded! We were out last night absolutely fucked and we just did a ten hour day—
Luis Arriaga: And we’ll have some drinkin’ later on! [And we did.—ed.]
Reb Kennedy: We have that youth you lose as days go past.
Is soul real?
Reb Kennedy: It is!
Luis Arriaga: I signed mine to Reb!
Reb Kennedy: I have them all in bottles! I keep their souls! It keeps me looking young! If people feel they need to label music—we are a rock ‘n’ roll label, but the key word to everything we do is soul. You may not hear it in Brain Jail—if you’re deaf!—but soul doesn’t mean Otis Redding, or it does—soul is putting your heart into what you’re doing. Our guys do that—our guys are here today doing it!
Luis Arriaga: We do what we do—we have soul and heart and we’re all friends and we work hard for each other. It’s a DIY label … and this mustache is itching me.
Reb Kennedy: Give it back to the woman you took it from.
What’s the biggest difference between the crowd at a bar mitzvah and the crowd at the release party for the porno movie you soundtracked?
Luis Arriaga: So many years between! The bar mitzvah was when we were kids—all we had was that 45! That kid found me in Vegas and took me to a burger joint. He remembered me! ‘You played my bar mitzvah!’ ‘Who are you? Who is this awkward drunk?’
Reb Kennedy: Funny thing about the porno—a lot of acts aspire to get movies and soundtracks and we’d like that.
Looking for a Mitsubishi commercial?
Reb Kennedy: We are! I like Cadillacs.
Nick Tosches says rock ‘n’ roll was invented by a lot of guys who wanted Cadillacs.
Reb Kennedy: It’s the truth!
Luis Arriaga: We’ve done other pornos.
Angel Hernandez: Pizza delivery boy number one!
Luis Arriaga: The same guy that did Bad Luck Betties asked me and Angel for a favor, so we played a lot of music on it.
Angel Hernandez: So yeah, we did a porno together.
Luis Arriaga: Don’t print this! My mom is gonna read it! No—if it’s not in Spanish, it’s cool.
Angel Hernandez: ReBelle Rousers.
Luis Arriaga: Look at the credits. Just me and him—we recorded every single instrument. We didn’t know how to play.
Reb Kennedy: Skin flute?
Angel Hernandez: Rusty trombone.
Luis Arriaga: Now this is serious shit. It was nominated for an AVN award for the soundtrack because of us—they started the category for us! And check this shit. Bad Luck Betties—the next one—again in the category we helped start—print this shit! Let me help you type this! Bad Luck Betties was also nominated for ‘Best Soundtrack’ and we lost … to Eddie Van Halen! Not a bad second! He provided one song while Wild Records did a whole soundtrack.
So did you all gather round together and watch your porno proudly?
Luis Arriaga: The circle jerk? What was the question?
Reb Kennedy: The jerk-off competition?
Angel Hernandez: And everybody won!

LUIS & THE WILDFIRES WITH EL VEZ, THE LOVELY ELVETTES AND LOS STRAITJACKETS ON FRI., DEC. 18, AT THE TROUBADOUR, 9081 SANTA MONICA BLVD., WEST HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $15-$18 / ALL AGES. TROUBADOUR.COM. LUIS & THE WILDFIRES’ BRAIN JAIL IS AVAILABLE FROM NORTON AND THE “I’M A MAN” 45 IS AVAILABLE FROM WILD RECORDS. VISIT LUIS & THE WILDFIRES AT MYSPACE.COM/THEWILDFIRES OR WILDPRESENTS.COM.

Download: Kid Congo Powers and the Pink Monkey Birds “Rare As The Yeti”

(from Dracula Boots out now on In The Red)

Kid Congo Powers was a Cramp and a Bad Seed (and a founding member of the Gun Club) before striking off on his own with a flock of Pink Monkey Birds. His newest album is out now on In The Red and he speaks now just minutes after finishing recording a new album in a high school gymnasium in Kansas. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

So your drummer is now the proud owner of an abandoned Kansas high school?
Kid Congo Powers (guitar/vocals): Yes—my drummer Ron Miller and his girlfriend-slash-partner Nicole—who does a blog called Disgruntled Housewife—moved into a rural Kansas town with a population of 250 called Harveyville, and they were looking for an alternative space to live. And they came upon this 1940s high school that was not in use. And now they’ve got a lot of desks and furniture and projectors and record players and chalkboards. It’s an artists’ retreat. Different people come here—dancers, choreographers, writers, painters—every kind! It’s a cool thing. It was a dream of mine to record in a high school gymnasium. My whole rock ‘n’ roll fantasy—actually, as a pre-teen, I was seeing my teenage older sisters going out to dances in high school. They and their cousins would be so excited—they used to go see thee Midniters! To me that was always so exciting. They’d play great great records—weirdo obscure records at high school gymnasiums. And so when Ron suggested we come up here, it was like, ‘Duh!’ This is it! This is a fantasy realized!
How often do you get the opportunity to realize your fantasies?
Kid Congo Powers: It’s one more in long list! This was a particularly long-suffering one. Other ones came well before.
What’s the next one on the list?
Kid Congo Powers: Wow! Jeez—Lord Lord almighty! A good night’s rest—that’s a fantasy! My next fantasy is to do another record. I always think this is the last time anyone’s gonna let me make a record. I think, ‘Now I’ve REALLY done it!’
You finished the last one like ninety minutes ago and you’re already thinking about the next?
Kid Congo Powers: Yeah—time for the next one! You just can’t stop.
You’ve lived so many places and been in so many bands—is this a function of musical wanderlust?
Kid Congo Powers: It’s completely wanderlust. Funny you should say that. I was just talking to someone because I’ve been writing a memoir. I was writing about meeting Jeffrey Lee Pierce and that was what we originally bonded on. He’d been traveling a lot already. This was like 1979 and he’d been in Europe and Jamaica and New York. That’s a real thing. And musically it definitely makes sense. Music to me is places and history and learning history, and you have to go to certain places to see the history for it to happen. That’s why I came out to the Midwest. I wanted to make a record that sounds like it was from a Midwestern high school!
Is this more a blessing or a curse?
Kid Congo Powers: I think it’s both! I have cursed it but I’m more blessed by it, I think. It keeps things all new for me. I think that might be more important, though it’s been bad for any careerist sort of thing. If I had any illusions to ‘making it big’ at any point, I think I lost them. And I became really happy to be part of my tribe of people. And I was happy to do what I originally set out to do—explore new things and make music that is different than other kinds off music, and say things in a different way. So in that way, I feel a grand success. And actually—right now I’m enjoying quite some popularity!
What do you think of this new generation? The children of Congo?
Kid Congo Powers: It’s great! When I was a young kid, I was very into ‘60s and ‘50s music and finding out about that. I met Jeffrey and we were already collecting blues records and rockabilly records. I’d idolize Iggy Pop or the Stooges or the Sonics or the Velvet Underground or whatever it was—the 13th Floor Elevators! And for the kids now, maybe I’m the age the the 13th Floor Elevators when I was collecting music when I was 20. And it’s a fascination with an attitude toward music. When we were young, I was really obsessed with James Dean or Andy Warhol’s Factory or whatever. Whatever was really rebellious—it was really attractive and romantic to me. And it was the same for me with music.
You’ve said before that sex is part of rebellion—how?
Kid Congo Powers: I think being sexual is very rebellious! Being sexual can really be looked down upon by puritanical people. Rock ‘n’ roll is abandon of any kind! Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll! It goes back to Billy Lee Riley and Jerry Lee Lewis—people have orgasms right in front of your ears! It speaks to your primal self. It’s getting to the meat of the matter. And rock ‘n’ roll is meant for dancing, and dancing is definitely a mating ritual.
What’s the next best mating ritual to dancing?
Kid Congo Powers: Fucking?
What if you’re on a transatlantic flight?
Kid Congo Powers: The next best thing to dancing to connect sexually would be screaming. Singing. Anything musical!
What’s your favorite thing about your primal self?
Kid Congo Powers: A desire to keep doing what I’m doing. A desire to keep excavating what is going on with me and what I know—I guess that’s called ‘transgressions’—so I guess being transgressive. And that I still like sex!
What’s the nightlife like in Harveyville?
Kid Congo Powers: Dark? A lot of stars. Not on the street but in the sky. There’s a big giant sky here. It’s unbelievable.
What was your most chillingly accurate experience with a fortune teller?
Kid Congo Powers: Besides shaking up the magic 8 ball? The scariest thing that happens with fortune telling is actually writing songs. Because they come from your subconscious and they actually come true. I made a record where I thought I was being romantic about a relationship, and it ends up I had a three-year-long break-up! Which was great fodder for songs but terrible, and everything I’d written about came true.
When does that become scary?
Kid Congo Powers: When I couldn’t get out of my situation. So I write about things now that are more absurd.
If the instrumental ‘Buck Angel’ had a chorus, what would it be?
Kid Congo Powers: ‘Buck Angel, will you be miiiine?’ Something like ‘Earth Angel’! I’m from L.A.—I grew up with the oldies!
Have you ever seen thee Midniters at the Santa Fe Springs swap meet?
Kid Congo Powers: I never have! I know there’s a version of them playing around. I do wanna look ‘em up. We did ‘I Found A Peanut.’ They were a giant source of inspiraton lately. For the last few records, they were very very inspirational in terms of sound, attitude and how to do things. They mixed up such things at R&B and soul and doo-wop and then psychedelic music and harder rock and they’d use horns—it’s such an amazing reflection of cult L.A. culture and Latino culture in America.
Have you seen that documentary on Chicano rock ‘n’ roll in L.A.?
Kid Congo Powers: I haven’t had a chance—I’ve been on the east coast. I’m interested in that. It’s very beautiful, very emotional. My grandparents came to L.A. from Mexico and it was really a dream for them. And my parents grew up in the depression.
What’s changed the most about L.A. for you?
Kid Congo Powers: The way it looks! L.A. has been very very terrible about knocking down buildings and things. I remember a nicer older L.A.! What’s there that would make me wanna stay? How nice the weather is and the architecture that is beautiful is really beautiful. And of course my family and I have the whole first half of my lifetime of friends still there. They’re very much a part of my family. Thanks to Facebook!
What American criminal would have been a great American musician?
Kid Congo Powers: What’s his name? Carl Panzram. He was a complete misanthrope and he traveled around the world and I think he was one of the all-time most deadly serial killers. He lived his whole life in prison and really had no remorse. He was very happy with the way he was!
So it’s self-confidence?
Kid Congo Powers: He was truly something! But he had a poetic streak to him. And some strange strange philosophy. I guess most killers do something to justify themselves, but he was kind of Manson-esque—kind of giving back what he got from society and the whole system. And I think Charles Starkweather would be a pretty dreamy Ricky Nelson type! Maybe that’s more realistic.
What’s the overlap between crime and creativity?
Kid Congo Powers: Stealing! Thievery is the thing.
You asked Dave Lombardo from Slayer if he’d eat human flesh, given the opportunity. Would you eat human flesh?
Kid Congo Powers: In an upside-down fruitcake, maybe.
What if it was someone you knew?
Kid Congo Powers: I don’t want no sloppy seconds!
What’s the first line of the first chapter of your memoir?
Kid Congo Powers: ‘I was born in a town called “The Feminine Bridge.””
La Puente?
Kid Congo Powers: It’s grammatically wrong! It’s ‘el puente’—‘el puente’ is the bridge. It’s a masculine term. So ‘la puente’ would be ‘the feminine bridge,’ wouldn’t it?
How did growing up in La Puente most shape your future life?
Kid Congo Powers: It turned me into a homosexual!
Have you told the city council?
Kid Congo Powers: Yes, exactly—‘You’ll pay for this!’ I’m owed some money! Because the name was skewed, I think my whole life I was gonna see things in a skewed way.
You’ve said your last record is smart and dumb and modern and primitive all at the same time—why?
Kid Congo Powers: I don’t know! Because I was born in the feminine bridge! It’s fittingly between two genders. There’s no one way of looking at things, I think.
What was your last crucial instinctual directive?
Kid Congo Powers: My last alarm? Don’t vote for Sarah Palin! The last big alarm was, ‘Don’t stop what you’re doing!’ I often think, ‘Oh, I’m too old to rock! What am I gonna do when I’m old? I don’t have any pensions!’
How will you get your guitar-shaped pool?
Kid Congo Powers: How AM I gonna get my guitar-shaped pool? But the alarm said just keep moving on. Always travel! I’ve lived everywhere and I learned the world is a big place. You can be anything everywhere, and moving gives you a fresh start. I move a lot. I’m in D.C. now and that has afforded me the time to actually write the book.
I read once that one of the values of a big city is that it’s so forgiving—you can fail and move a neighborhood over and start again with no one knowing who you were.
Kid Congo Powers: Reinvention is a great thing! And failure doesn’t have to remain failure. You don’t have to move to get over failure. I guess it’s wanderlust again, like at the start of our conversation. ‘Lust’ is in it—something you want, something you’re driven by. My sister just went this week to Europe to the first time in her life. I was like, ‘Wow, you’re gonna discover the world out there and you’re never gonna stop traveling!’
What is your favorite failure?
Kid Congo Powers: Something that’s now the best thing that ever happened to me? My best failure was probably leaving one of the first bands I was in. Maybe I thought getting thrown out of the Cramps was a big failure, but it was actually something that made me say, ‘OK, I have to keep moving—keep working.’ And that’s been a gift that keeps on giving. So I thank them for that! That could have been seen as a failure. Actually, to this day probably thirty years later, people are like, ‘Aren’t you sad you didn’t stay in the Cramps?’ No! I was in the Cramps when I was 20 or 21 years old and it was amazing and beautiful and wonderful and I did all this crazy stuff—why would I be sad? I learned so much!

KID CONGO POWERS WITH SECTION 25, MEDIUM MEDIUM, THE RAINCOATS, THE JAZZ BUTCHER, ABE VIGODA AND MANY MORE AT THE PART TIME PUNKS FESTIVAL ON SUN., OCT. 11, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 3 PM / $20-25 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. KID CONGO POWERS AND THE PINK MONKEY BIRDS’ DRACULA BOOTS IS OUT NOW ON IN THE RED. VISIT KID CONGO POWERS AT KIDCONGOPOWERS.BLOGSPOT.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/KIDCONGOPOWERSANDTHEPINKMONKEYBIRDS.

L.A. RECORD‘s Chris Ziegler and Charlie Rose will be the main stage (Bates stage) closing DJs from 5 PM to 10 PM on Sunday at Sunset Junction, which is right after Fool’s Gold and Tiny Masters of Today and during Mika Miko, the Sonics and Built To Spill as well as covering several unsupervised hours of sticky street food and rides. (Buzz Bands’ Kevin Bronson, Rock Insider’s Ashley Jax and Hell Ya!’s Heather Peggs will be DJing at other times.) If you don’t get a chance to visit us at our booth—which will have FREE coconut water that you can use to wash down your FREE L.A. RECORDs!—at Sunset Junction, come exchange knowing glances as we lead in the Sonics with something by Bunker Hill!

Hello to all! Tonight we celebrate the release of Vol. 4 Issue 4—Pasadena country singer DAVID SERBY on the cover and the much-touted NOSAJ THING decked out on the poster, and then inside you’ll find BRUCE LaBRUCE discussing love and romance and STEVE ALBINI of SHELLAC discussing fish, food and forest fires! Plus the mighty SONICS, the almost-Angeleno ART BRUT, the formidable FEMI KUTI, the unstoppable SHARON JONES (who did her interview immediately after returning from the hospital!) and the legendary LEROY SIBBLES of Studio One’s HEPTONES and much more than we could courteously insert in just one simple email! (THE SHINS, CHAIRLIFT, BUSDRIVER, HANDSOME FURS, YA HO WHA 13, THE HUNCHES discussing their last show ever, Grandaddy’s JASON LYTLE and still yet more…) Issues available at the Cha Cha tonight—free to visit and copies of the new L.A. RECORD free as always! Hope to see you there and many thanks for all support!

Download: The Sonics “Strychnine”

(from Here Are The Sonics! available now on Norton)

The Sonics weren’t pioneers so much as cavemen—the first humans to discover tools, fire and the absolute rudiments of chemistry. Their original ‘60s songs still sound wild and feral today, and their debut Here Are The Sonics! devours most of the million punk rock records that timidly followed it. This will be their first Los Angeles-area show ever. This interview by Dan Collins.

When was the last time you guys played the Los Angeles area?
Larry Parypa (guitar/vocals): I don’t think we ever did. We recorded down there a bunch. We went to the Whisky a Go Go and the Turtles and the Doors were there, before they got really popular.
Gerry Roslie (vocals/organ): We saw Ike and Tina Turner! It was extremely happening down there. We were like wide-eyed country boys.
A lot of L.A. bands really emulated the Beatles. But you guys didn’t seem to be Anglophiles.
LP: We loved the Beatles, and we even played some of their songs, but in no way did we try to emulate the Beatles. We were a very minor, dark sounding group for those days.
GR: We’d try to do a pretty song, and it’d just end up getting ‘nice and rough!’
Rob Lind (sax/harmonica/vocals): We loved the Kinks. We actually traveled with them and opened a number of shows for them.
LP: We played the way that we played, which was without a whole lot of technique, and real hard. A live performance—I mean, the room would almost breathe because it was so powerful. Knowing that we weren’t masterful musicians or anything, knowing that we weren’t a vocal group, we were there to pound it out. It was our style. Nobody was doing 1-3-4 progressions, real minor progressions. And they weren’t singing about the topics we sang about. And nobody was screaming!
You both had brothers in the band. Did Larry and Andy ever fight like Ray and Dave Davies did?
GR: When didn’t they? They had some real sessions. We were heading down around the Portland area, and Larry had a brand new Buick, and had his radio on real loud, and me and Andy were in the back seat. Andy was like, ‘Turn that volume down back here at least!’ And finally Andy had enough getting Larry to do it, and he was drinking a bottle of grape pop, and he poured it down Larry’s speakers while the car was going down the freeway, and the speakers go ‘bloooblublublublublublublu!’ And he pulled over, and I think they were just about ready to go to blows right there on the side of the freeway. Andy was always on Larry’s case for playing too loud.
Why did you decide to scream about things like drinking strychnine? It seems like that would kill you.
GR: Well, I’m kind of crazy by nature. I do crazy things and think of crazy things. But I’m not dangerous—heh heh. Honest, judge!
RL: The PA systems were normally pretty bad. Sometimes we just had metal horns. And so Gerry started screaming so he could hear himself.
GR: It’s a wonder I’ve got a voice left! I screamed myself silly. I was inspired by the voices of Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis of course. I liked their energy, but I don’t remember anybody doing witchy stuff. It’s just a crazy, psychotic thing. After we got going, there did start to be crazy, witchy things, like Ozzy. Everything was kind of like, ‘love and marriage, la la la la la,’ and I went ‘Nah! That’s not dirty enough! That’s not the way I feel!’
A lot of your songs seem to be about revenge—particularly upon some girl! Was there a particular relationship in your life where you’re like ‘I’m going to get even with her and write a song about it?’
GR: Do you have a couple hours, my friend? Who hasn’t been screwed over—guys or girls?
Do you secretly hope to yourself that some day, that girl is going to walk into a record store and see a Sonics poster and think to herself, ‘I blew it!’?
GR: Oh, yeah, I do hope that happens! That would be sweet!
You guys are often cited as the original punk band. Did you feel a kinship with bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols?
RL: The Clash, I thought they were hard-rocking gods. The Sex Pistols, I didn’t like a whole lot of the stuff they did, but I liked their attitude, and every once in a while I’d hear one of their songs and go ‘Whoa, that’s good. Way to go, guys!’
LP: After the late ‘60s, I didn’t listen to music much. If I did, it was probably more country.
RL: Yeah, more the Seattle guys—that’s really where garage rock started with us, and it was like Nirvana, and Pearl Jam, and Mudhoney, and Screaming Trees, and Alice and Chains—it was kind of like those guys were our sons! We were real proud of them.
Let’s talk about the earlier Northwest scene. It seems like the first breakout bands were instrumental combos like the Ventures and the Frantics.
RL: The Frantics and the Ventures and Paul Revere kind of predated us. I think one of the first rock songs I ever heard was ‘Walk, Don’t Run,’ and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.
LP: God, the Frantics were just a fantastic group! Even today, they really stand up. The first interest I ever had in guitar was Duane Eddy—actually it was ‘Rumble’ by Link Wray, but then Duane Eddy had a song out that was all instrumental, and just really got me stimulated to want to play guitar. Not long after that, the Ventures came out with their stuff, and I tried to learn every song on the Ventures album. Another band that was more regional was the Wailers. They came out with instrumentals that had much harder rhythms than what the Ventures were doing, but then they got Rockin’ Roberts, and Gail Harris, and they would do vocals.
I used to have their album Live at the Castle. Did you ever play at the Castle in Tacoma?
LP: Yeah! In fact, we turned down Jimi Hendrix there, before he was the Jimi Hendix. He came and wanted to sit in, and we told him to get lost! It was a big club—a big dance spot for the Seattle area. You’d maybe get a thousand kids in there. There was a place called the Crescent Ballroom in Tacoma, where the Wailers played a lot. It’s like the first time I ever played there—I was 14 or 15, and probably didn’t have a clue about what I was doing. Lesley Gore came through town and for some reason, my brother [Andy] and I were part of the backup group for her. We did that with the Shangri-Las also, and we just ruined them! We knew we were going to back them up, but we didn’t learn their songs! Their songs had a lot of breaks in them, and we’d play right through them.
RL: The lead singer of the Shangri-Las said something snarky about us. So next time we played with them, we made fun of them. They were doing ‘Leader of the Pack,’ and Gerry was riding his piano like a motorcycle, and I was down on my knees, being like, ‘No, Danny, please please don’t go!’ We just humiliated them. You don’t come to Seattle and trash the Sonics! So they said they’d never play with us again.
We interviewed Mary Weiss last year. Do you want to tell her publicly that you’re sorry?
LP: We’re sorry! We played in Barcelona last year, and she was also on the bill. And she remembered! Oh, yeah!
RL: We smoothed things over. She’s playing with the guy from the Smithereens, Dennis, and we drank a lot of Scotch in the hotel in Barcelona, and we sat and chatted with Mary and her husband. Things are fine now.
How about Paul Revere and the Raiders? Any bad grudges there you want to settle? Like, who played ‘Louie Louie’ better?
RL: Oh, I think we did! I don’t think there’s any question!
Did you get just a little pissed off when the Raiders got to be on TV and in Teen Beat and you guys didn’t?
RL: Not at the time. I used to know Paul Revere, and Paul is the epitome of a businessman. The problem with Northwest rock ‘n’ roll bands—with the exception of the Ventures who broke out and became worldwide—was that us and the Wailers got trapped in the Northwest.
LP: We didn’t even think too much about what we were doing musically or where we were going. We’d hardly ever practice or anything. We would throw our instruments in the van maybe Sunday night after doing some weekend stuff, and wouldn’t pull them out again until we’d play again. We were more interested in whether we could get girls into the motel rooms that night.
It was kind of the cusp of the Summer of Love! Did you guys get to have drug orgies?
LP: We’d have the bathtub full of beer and stuff—to try to ply them with liquor. That really was a key objective. The music was just a vehicle to get us in some parties! You’d hit the road in summers, just playing one-night-stands all over the place. That was an exciting way to spend your teenage life!
The Meters recorded a live album on the Queen Mary—are you guys planning on recording one there too?
RL: No, we’re not doing that. We’re actually planning on going back into the studio in July. All new material. We need to get new stuff out.
LP: We don’t know what’s going to happen because we don’t practice. We go months and don’t touch our instruments. For this show we’re going to get together for an hour and a half at my house before going to L.A. and run through the songs again just so we can make sure we remember them. And sometimes we don’t!
I’ve heard a couple cuts from your previous 1972 reunion, which Norton added as a bonus on the Sonics Boom album. It sounds even more hard than your sixties recordings. How did you guys resist the urge to get all bluesy like Foghat?
RL: We never sat there and scratched our heads and said ‘What could our gimmick be?’ We always played real hard. Larry played guitar as hard as he could. Bob Bennett played drums as hard as he could. Jerry screamed and banged on the piano. I tried to play sax the way Larry played guitar. I tried to play as hard-dirty-nasty as I could. We used to play dances in armories or big roller rinks, where we’d have three-four-five thousand people. And we didn’t want people standing around with their arms folded staring at us. We wanted people to start dancing immediately. What a lot of bands would do is blow two or three songs and get the level right and then get into it. We wanted to get into it as soon as we hit the stage, so we came out blasting from the get-go! And that’s exactly what we do now. We are going to come out blastin’ and attempt to blow the place up.
GR: We don’t tone it down! We don’t try to blow people’s heads off, but… well, yeah, we might try to blow people’s heads off. What the heck?
Ar the end of your career, suddenly a basketball team starts up in your own town and calls itself the ‘Supersonics.’ Did you feel your name had been usurped?
LP: We thought it would be good publicity to sue them, even though we’d lose—just to say, ‘Hey, the Sonics are suing the Sonics!’
GR: It was kind of a shock! But we were out of the business. But now they’re gone, and we’re back!

THE SONICS WITH THE FUZZTONES, THE WOGGLES, THE VOODUO, GIZELLE, THE NEW FIDELITY AND MANY MORE ON SAT., JUNE 6, AT THE INK-N-IRON FESTIVAL AT THE QUEEN MARY, 1126 QUEENS HWY., LONG BEACH. DOORS AT 11 AM / BANDS AT NOON / SONICS AT 10 PM / $35-$70 / 7+. COMPLETE FESTIVAL LINE-UP AND MORE INFO AT INK-N-IRON.COM. THE SONICS’ RECORDS ARE AVAILABLE NOW ON NORTON. VISIT THE SONICS AT MYSPACE.COM/THESONICSBOOM.

L.A. RECORD is very excited to learn that the Sonics are headlining one of the days at Long Beach’s Ink N Iron festival this June 5, 6 and 7. As far as we know, this is the only Sonics show in Southern California in decades? And their only show close to L.A. in recent memory, barring that SXSW date. Now all we need is the Mummies chucked in here somewhere. Visit ink-n-iron.com for more info and get tickets here!